On to the terrace with a cup of coffee just after a cat nap has been one of my recently developed habits. Then the routine glances around the Nilgiri library and some of those heritage buildings. On sunny days it is ok but when the visibility is almost zero I cheat myself by saying “oh, this is the other side of Ooty.”
On such days I ransack my book shelf and pick up some old books. The other day, it was an old dairy and I opened it at random. Wow! just see the following lines scribbled in it a few years ago…
“These high wild hills and rough uneven ways
Draw out our miles and make them wearisome;
But yet your fair discourse hath been as sugar,
Making the hard way sweet and delectable”
and
“there was speech in their dumbness, language
in their very gesture!”
A few pages away from this I saw these lines “He did the English language proud.. Born in a village near Kumbakonam to a poor vaidhik”, it is about the great Srinivasa Sastry about whom an Englishman said “Sastri has made me realise the heights to which the English language could rise”. Some of my close relatives had drawn inspiration from him and even the present generation are proud of all of them !
